Monday, September 27, 2010

Tactics: Is a messiah complex the cause of England's failings?

A mythological desire to find and then destroy saviours lies at the heart of the national team's lasting malaise

Fabio Capello is just the latest England manager to have been ridiculed by this country's mediax. Photograph: Rebecca Blackwell/AP

One of the oddities of reading Charles Reep, the pioneer of match-analysis in Britain, is that in among the Pooterish self-righteousness, and what at times seems an almost systematic misinterpretation of statistics, you come upon the odd nugget of wisdom. "The maximum number of matches played in the World Cup final stages, by any one team, has been six, up to the present date," he wrote in his unpublished book of 1973, League Championship Winning Soccer and the Random Effect. (Even now, with the tournament expanded to thirty-two teams, it is only seven). "The mechanism of random chance in soccer is such that merit is entirely subordinated to the chance in the first three matches of any series, where the teams are not very widely different in class, and that merit cannot show itself reliably in less than twelve matches."

Reep was dismissive of those who read too much into World Cups, and while he probably takes the attitude too far – nobody, surely, would claim that the five-times world champions Brazil are not the greatest football nation on earth, merely the luckiest – it does seem the case that the events of one month every four years are afforded a significance out of proportion with their span. So, after qualifying for the World Cup by scoring seven more goals than anybody else in Europe – from the only group to feature three sides that had played at the 2006 World Cup –Fabio Capello found himself condemned on the basis of four games.

England played reasonably but not spectacularly in two of those (against USA and Slovenia), and poorly in the other two. The overall impression was dire but it might have been very different had Frank Lampard's effort against Germany been allowed. England didn't deserve to be level at that point, but who knows what the psychological impact – for both sides – of seeing a two-goal lead wiped out would have been? Of course Capello must take responsibility, and of course some of the criticism he received was legitimate, but for a man with his record to be portrayed as a know-nothing donkey by the nation's best-selling daily on the basis of four matches is absurd.

It was not, though, unprecedented. Every England manager from Bobby Robson onwards, with the exception of Terry Venables, has suffered similar vilification. There are various reasons. Robson, for instance, was a victim of the increasingly frenzied sales war between the Sun and the Mirror, and the truth is that a savaging done well does sell. Glenn Hoddle drew flak with an ill-judged book and his unorthodox religious beliefs. Sven-Goran Eriksson made himself vulnerable with his off-field shenanigans and unwise dalliance with the fake Sheikh, but the sense was that the press turned against him because they were bored.

Yet it makes perfect sense when placed in the context of the fertility rites of ancient tribes – "Belief in the old 'godhead' must be eroded before the new godhead can be validated, lingering affection for the first Terry must be converted to contempt," explains Dr Jon Adams from the LSE. "Admiration must be converted to mockery. We see a similar situation in the lampooning of political figures by caricaturists or oppressed people – the burning of effigies, for example, or Chaplin's Great Dictator. So the film is occupied with the discrediting of the first Terry, the better to elect the second.

"The curious thing is that the film doesn't explain why the first Terry was sacked, simply that he was, and the first Terry doesn't actually exhibit any signs of weakness until the deposition. He isn't deposed because he is weak, but his deposition, nonetheless, reveals his weakness.

In this respect, the film's mythological structure is almost Jobian: what we are witnessing is the first Terry's failure to cope with trial. His latent weakness, previously untested, has been exposed. The speed and totality of the first Terry's collapse discloses failings previously unseen. At the end, with the first Terry entirely broken, we realise that we were ourselves mistaken: he was always an unworthy mascot, and our gratitude and affections are transferred to the second Terry, and transitively to the manager who wisely exposed the first Terry for what he was: a false god."

The Golden Bough and the England manager

Adams's tongue, it's fair to say, is not entirely out of his cheek when applying the lessons of The Golden Bough to a cartoon about a mascot being redesigned. But the anthropological principles have a wider application. The Golden Bough was first published in 1890. It was the work of James Frazer, a Scottish scholar who in seeking to explain the scene in the Aeneid in which Aeneas and the Sybil give a golden bough to the gatekeeper of Hades to gain entrance, wrote a ground-breaking study investigating the similarity of the structures that underlie myths from various cultures across the globe. It was, as the US anthropologist Weston LaBarre noted, essentially an extended footnote.

But what a footnote (750 pages of close type even in the abridged version). Investigating the ritual murder that marked the succession of the priesthood of Diana at Aricia, Frazer came to the conclusion that most religions and mythologies were rooted in fertility cults that centred on the worship and periodic sacrifice of a sacred king, who was representative of a dying and reviving god, a solar deity who married a goddess of the earth who died at harvest-time and was reincarnated each spring.

The truism that football is a modern religion may be facile, but its ritualistic aspects do at times ape religious discourse, and nowhere is that more true than with the England national team. After 44 years without success there is need both for faith – "X years of hurt never stopped us dreaming" – and a messiah to lead England out of the wilderness. So each new saviour is welcomed with the equivalent of palm fronds as he rides into Jerusalem, but then, having failed – or even faltered – must undergo humiliation and ritual execution before the new king can be anointed.

He is, Adams says, "the vessel into which hopes are poured, but also a scapegoat – carrying the sins of the people, and whose execution or exile absolves the people." So when it all goes wrong, rather than actually taking the steps that might improve English football – there is talk now, as there always is, of the need to improve coaching and focus more on technique – it's far easier to heap the blame on an individual:

Turnip-head Taylor, Keegan weeping in the toilets, the Wally with the Brolly. To a lesser extent the same is true of players: Tony Adams being pursued through Luton Airport in 1988, David Beckham hanged in effigy after his red card in 1998 and Wayne Rooney first booed at Wembley and then castigated and ridiculed for alleged events in his private life.

And so, as with the mascot, the messiah is revealed to have been a false god, English football is absolved of blame and our gratitude is passed to the newspaper who exposed the falseness of the idol. That may sound ridiculous, but the turnip back-page, for instance, now tends to raise a chuckle at the ingenuity of its creator. And how appropriate that the newspaper that should be at the forefront of enacting the rites of ancient solar deities should be The Sun.

If there is a solution to England's persistent under-performance at major tournaments – if it is under-performance, which some, notably Simon Kuper and Stefan Szymanski, dispute – it probably lies in ditching the messiah complex and instead turning to the theory of arguably the most successful British sports coach of the last decade, Dave Brailsford. Rather than looking to one great individual to lift everybody else, he talks of "improving performance by the aggregation of marginal gains. It means finding a 1% margin for improvement in everything you do".

In cycling, a lot of that is clearly related to the design of the bike and the helmet, but the approach is applicable to football. If each player is 1% fitter, 1% happier, 1% more motivated, 1% quicker, if the nutrition is 1% better, if muscle recovery is improved 1%, if the midfield is 1% better drilled, the defence 1% better organised, it can make a difference.

The likes of Diego Maradona are extremely rare. Football is almost never about one player or about the manager, it shouldn't be about the search for one "world-class" player or coach. It should be about taking the best raw materials available and assembling them in the best possible way. English football needs to rid itself of its messiah-complex, stop looking for a mythical saviour who is going to redeem the protracted decline and get on with making the best of the present situation. As long as there are messiahs, there are going to be crucifixions.

Quote of the moment

Defying belief however, is a market Benitez has cornered quite well. The moment you think Benitez is clueless, he defies it by pulling off a result of majesty, like the one achieved in Madrid. The moment he is hailed a genius, he masterminds toothless surrender to a team going nowhere. In the ongoing Anfield power struggle, just when he was cornered by the firing squad, the Spaniard's demise at Liverpool looking practically assured with the ominous suspension of betting by the bookmakers, he squeezes out through a narrow trapdoor and eliminates Rick Parry. Rafa Benitez is Keyzer Soze.

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